SciTech oriented blog

According to IBM scientist Matthias Steffen, Big Blue has chosen to employ superconducting qubits, whose unique properties allow quantum computers to work on millions of computations at once.

In contrast, the average desktop PC is only capable of handling minimal simultaneous computations. To be sure, a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe.

These properties will obviously have wide-spread implications for the field of data encryption where quantum computers could factor very large numbers like those used to decode and encode sensitive information.

“The quantum computing work we are doing shows it is no longer just a brute force physics experiment. It’s time to start creating systems based on this science that will take computing to a new frontier,” said Steffen.

For ten years, it’s been known that RNA interference could potentially kill cancer by shutting off malfunctioning genes – but there’s been no efficient way to deliver the RNA.

Usually, the short interfering RNA (siRNA) used is quickly broken down inside the body by enzymes that defend against infection by RNA viruses.

“It’s been a real struggle to try to design a delivery system that allows us to administer siRNA, especially if you want to target it to a specific part of the body,” says Paula Hammond, an engineering professor at MIT.

Now, though, Hammond and her team have come up with a way of packing RNA into microspheres so dense that they can stay intact until they reach their destinations.

To improve transmission speeds, the Internet has transitioned over the years from one using copper to fiber optic cabling. Unfortunately, this has caused a bottleneck to occur where the light signals meet with electronic circuitry. Researchers have been working for years on a way to make routers, and most particularly, their memory, all optic, to avoid having to convert the signals at all. Now, it appears one such group, NTT, a Japanese telecommunications company, has figured out a way to do it. They describe their work in a paper published in Nature Photonics.

A team of researchers in Germany has created a new way to overcome many of the issues associated with bringing high-speed digital communications across challenging terrain and into remote areas, commonly referred to as the “last mile” problem. The researchers developed a record-speed wireless data bridge that transmits digital information much faster than today’s state-of-the-art systems.